Chapter 25 · The Reckoning
Silas found Data Haven’s Achilles’ heel in the seventy-third hour of its existence.
Not through technical means — through people. He dug up a twenty-year-old engineering memorandum from Starlink’s Asia-Pacific Security Center archives, tucked among a batch of paper documents marked “for destruction,” the pages already yellowed and brittle. The memorandum recorded the backup power system deployment plan for Starlink’s first-generation ground segment — in that plan, the backup power rooms of all old-model ground stations were designed as “core node disaster recovery hosting areas,” capable of deploying an independent set of domain name resolution servers to take over basic routing functions if orbital satellites lost all contact with ground control.
That plan was never implemented. Starlink’s inter-satellite laser links reduced ground segment redundancy requirements to a minimum, and those backup power rooms were never used for disaster recovery hosting. But Silas found a list in the memorandum’s appendix — listing seventeen abandoned ground stations worldwide that still retained the physical structure of backup power rooms.
The eighth coordinate on the list: approximately seventy kilometers north of Shenzhen.
Silas pressed his hand on that coordinate, feeling that what he held wasn’t a piece of paper — it was a rope that was tightening.
He didn’t report it to Milan. He directly contacted a militant faction on Starlink’s board of directors — a man named Cole, a former U.S. Air Force brigadier general, now vice chairman of Starlink’s Strategic Security Committee. Cole listened to Silas’s four-minutebriefing on an encrypted call, then asked one question:
“That autonomous domain — what do they call it?”
“Data Haven.”
“You’re sure its core node is at that ground station?”
“Certain. Data Haven’s routing pattern is tree-like expansion — all route advertisements ultimately trace back to one root node. The root node’s physical path traces back to an independent power supply system in a backup power room. That system isn’t on Starlink’s networked asset inventory — it’s an isolated, offline physical machine. But its power cable runs from that room.”
Cole was silent for a few seconds. Silas could hear slow, tobacco-soaked breathing on the line.
“What authorization level do you need?”
“Physical removal. Not network-level blocking — their routing protocol has self-healing mechanisms. Even if we cut the link, they’ll automatically find new paths. The root node has to be physically removed.”
“Any civilian facilities near the ground station?”
“No permanent population within a five-kilometer radius.”
Cole’s breathing paused for a moment. Then he said something that curled the corner of Silas’s mouth:
“I’ll authorize it. Use a drone. No ground personnel operation records will remain in Starlink’s system. What payload do you need?”
After hanging up, Silas stood in his office for a moment. He didn’t turn on the light — the night view of Shenzhen spread before him outside the window, like avast circuit board lit by light-emitting diodes. He looked north in that sea of lights — toward the abandoned ground station. He couldn’t see it. But he knew it was there.
That root server, which would determine Data Haven’s fate, was at this moment running quietly in a concrete equipment room seventy kilometers away, executing the nested entry point routing rules Milan Vojnović had left behind. It didn’t know it had already been locked onto. It was just a machine, executing the instructions written for it.
Silas picked up his coat and walked out of his office. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going. He was going to the command center in person to watch that drone take off.
Because he wanted to see Data Haven physically erased with his own eyes.
Because this was his last chance.
Milan learned about it nine minutes after the drone took off.
Not through Starlink’s official notification system — Cole and Silas had bypassed his authorityhierarchy, using the board’s strategic security authorization to directly dispatch the drone. Milan discovered it through a side channel he had buried in Starlink’s satellite ground commandlink: a non-standardcommand stream — not in any Starlink standard protocol format — originating from a tactical terminal in the Asia-Pacific Security Center, jumping three times, finally reaching the flight control system of a military-grade drone parked at a备用 base in Huizhou.
Instruction content: Arm. Ascend. Lock coordinates.
Milan sat in his Belgrade office, the time already late at night. His screen displayed the parsed set of instruction parameters — altitude, speed, payload type, target coordinates. He read them twice, confirming he hadn’t misread any number.
Target coordinates: 22.71°N, 113.91°E.
The abandoned ground station. Data Haven’s root node.
Milan didn’t stand up. Didn’t pound the desk. Didn’t call anyone to argue or ask for help. He sat in his chair, in the darkness, replaying the entire process in his mind — Silas had bypassed him, Cole had given authorization, the drone was already in the air. According to the flight parameters, the drone would arrive over the target in approximately eleven minutes. The payload it carried was not an explosive, but a high-power microwave emitter — it wouldn’t cause an explosion, wouldn’t leave a crater, but it would instantly fry the motherboards of all unshielded electronic equipment in that equipment room. Hard drives would be demagnetized. The server would be permanently disabled. Data Haven’s root node would physically disappear.
Milan opened an offline terminal. He dialed a number he hadsaved for a long time but never used — the emergency line for the Shenzhen safe house.
When Lu Yuan picked up the phone, Milan didn’t speak. He heard a man’s breathing on the other end — steady, awake, as if he had already anticipated this call.
“A drone is already on its way.” Milan’s voice had a strange flatness to it, as he heard it himself, like a piece of asphalt that had been run over by a roller too many times. “It departed from Huizhou, flight altitude twelve hundred meters, cruising speed 220 kilometers per hour. Estimated arrival time — ten minutes. Payload is high-power microwave. It will fry all unshielded electronics in the equipment room housing the root server.”
He paused.
“Silas bypassed me to get authorization. I can’trecall it remotely. The drone has already switched to autonomous mode — once it enters the attack path, control transfers from the ground station to the onboard computer. The only way to intercept it — is physical.”
On the other end of the line, Lu Yuan was silent for about two seconds. When he spoke, his voice was much calmer than Milan had expected:
“Which direction is it coming from?”
“Northwest.”
“We’ll see it.”
Milan tightened his grip on the handset — not in anger, but a feeling he couldn’t name, something like weightlessness.
“Lu Yuan — you still have time to evacuate.”
“Evacuate to where? After the root node is fried, Data Haven’s autonomous domain will be internally reclaimed by Starlink’s consensus protocol within an hour. We’re not starting over — we built a house in Milan Vojnović’s system. The property rights are his. He can reclaim this land anytime.”
Milan didn’t speak.
“So this isn’t a question of retreat,” Lu Yuan said. “It’s whether you can find a better method than frying it, before that drone gets there.”
Milan hung up.
He sat in the darkness, the terminal screen’s light illuminating his face, cutting hissilhouette into two sharply divided halves — light and dark. The drone was flying. The root server was still running. He knew the exact position of that backup power room — he even remembered every word of that engineering memorandum, because it was a document he had reviewed himself twenty years ago. The design redundancy of that room was sufficient to resistconventional electromagnetic interference, but high-power microwave was another level — it was a weapon-grade payload specifically designed to destroy electronic equipment.
He glanced at the nested entry point status indicator. Blue, still online. Data Haven was still breathing.
Then he made a decision.
He stood up and walked to the door. He took the dark gray coat from the coat rack — November in Belgrade was already very cold. He didn’t bring a computer, didn’t bring a phone, only a set of car keys.
He knew where Silas was at this moment. Starlink’s Asia-Pacific Security Center’s tactical command room in Shenzhen — a shielded space three stories underground, equipped with a communication array directly connected to all Starlink satellites in orbit. Silas would be there, watching the drone’s real-time footage, watching the roof of that abandoned ground station gradually magnify in the night through its electro-optical sensor.
Milan was going to that room.
Not through the network. Not through the phone.
In person.
From Milan’s Belgrade apartment to Shenzhen’s tactical command room, the straight-line distance was over eight thousand kilometers. Milan didn’t fly there — he couldn’t cross eight thousand kilometers in ten minutes.
But he didn’t need to.
Because the tactical command room where Silas was located, in the architecture of Starlink’s global command chain, was not an isolated physical space. It was logically connected to all chief-level executives’ remote access ports — including the terminal in Milan’s Belgrade office. Under Starlink’s protocol, any chief architect could instantly access any tactical command room’s audio-video matrix using the highest-level authorization code.
Milan didn’t use remote access. He used another port.
He opened the black workstation in the corner of his office — that machine that didn’t belong to the Starlink network, connected to an independent fiber optic line. He typed a single line of instructions, activating a set of scripts he had written six years ago and never used. The script’s function was simple: push a video signal to the main screen of the Shenzhen tactical command room through a path that didn’t exist in any routing table of Starlink’s official network.
The source of that video signal was the camera in Milan’s office. Himself.
He straightened his collar. Then he pressed the push key.
On the main screen of the Shenzhen tactical command room — themassive display composed of twelvetiled screens, which had been showing the drone’s electro-optical sensor’s real-time footage — thefootage was forcibly switched.
Milan Vojnović’s face appeared on the screen.
There were about a dozen people in the tactical command room. Operators, analysts, communications coordinators. They all froze when Milan’s face appeared — not from fear, but from the cognitive dissonance of working at Starlink for years and never seeing the chief protocol architect appear on a tactical screen this way.
Silas stood in the center of the command room, his back to the main screen. He noticed everyone’s expression change and turned around.
Then he saw Milan’s face.
“Silas.” Milan’s voice came through the command room’s audio system, clear, steady, without any distortion. “You did what you had to do. I’m about to do what I have to do.”
Silas didn’t answer. His jaw was clenched tight, the masseter muscles bulging in hard contours on the sides of his face. He knew, of course, that Milan would come — he just hadn’t expected Milan to do it this way.
“You want to stop me?” Silas said, not loud, but every word was clearly audible in the quiet command room. “You’re too late. The drone is — ” he raised his wrist to check a tactical watch, ” — seven and a half minutes from target.”
“I’m not stopping you.” Milan said. “I can’t stop that drone. You designed an attack path with no point of no return — I know. It’s your style. No cancel switch once initiated.”
Silas’s eyebrows moved slightly.
“But everything you’ve done — not just today — has a cancel switch.” Milan’s voice spread evenly through the command room’s speakers, like a layer of ice covering over everyone. “The data black market. Three unauthorized token resale channels established in Bangkok, Singapore, and Lima. Thetransfer records of seven shell companies you registered in Hong Kong. The private communication archives you obtained through security monitoring backdoors, used for blackmailing political and business figures in Southeast Asia. I’ve preserved all of it.”
Silas’s expression didn’t change much, but his breathing rhythm changed — deeper, slower, like someone striving to maintain their oxygen supply.
“You thought those records disappeared in the audit log erasure operations.” Milan said. “But the Ingress-7 protocol doesn’t just have one audit output port. There’s another one — Silas — one you don’t have permission to see. Six years ago, when I designed this system, Ireserved a backup output port for people like you.”
Milan paused on the other end of the screen. His gaze didn’t leave the camera, as if looking through the lens at everyone in the room.
“I was waiting for your errors to accumulate enough. Now they have.”
He pressed a key on his terminal.
Not sending to Silas. An encrypted email — simultaneously sent to three addresses: the Starlink CEO’s private mailbox, the board’s security audit committee, and the International Criminal Court’s electronic filing system in The Hague, Netherlands.
Attachment size: 2.3 GB. Contents: a complete copy of the audit logs spanning from Silas’s first day at Starlink to today, cross-verified by Milan with independent data sources, each record’s tampering traces marked.
Send status: Success.
After completing this operation, Milan refocused his gaze on the camera. His expression held none of a victor’s smugness, no anger — only the calm of someone who had finally executed apredetermined step after a long wait.
“The Data Party matter — Starlink will cover it up. Starlink can’t admit its core network has a backdoor anyone could exploit. But the evidence of the data black market — those are your personal crimes. Starlink can’t tolerate internal corruption threatening its monopoly legitimacy. They’ll hand you over. Because you’re unrecyclable.”
Silas stood still, saying nothing. The corner of his mouth twitched slightly — like someone who, facing a chess game that could no longer be turned around, had finally put down the piece they had been clutching for too long.
“You destroyed your own career,” he said, not loud, with a frozen flatness.
“Maybe,” Milan said. “But at least I won’t be thinking about this from a prison cell.”
He cut the video connection.
The command room’s large screen switched back to the drone’s electro-optical sensor’s real-time footage. In thefootage, the roof of the abandoned ground station was slowly magnifying in the center of the frame — the onboard computer had completed target identification, framing the backup power room’s position with a green square. That concrete block glowed with faint thermal signals in night-vision mode — the server inside the room was still running, the cooling system expelling faint residual heat.
Silas stared at thatfootage. His hand moved involuntarily — not angesture, an empty grasp reaching for something but touching nothing.
Then he lowered his hand, saying nothing.
No one in the command room asked about the next step. Because everyone knew that drone wasn’t coming back — it had already entered autonomous attack mode. No one on the ground could change its course.
When the drone was four minutes from target, Lu Yuan saw it.
He stood in the open space in front of the abandoned ground station’s equipment room. The night wind was stronger than earlier in the night, the wild grass blown flat and upright by the wind, producing a continuous rustling sound. The cloud layer overhead was thin, the moon casting a hazy glow through the clouds, staining the ground station’ssilhouette in a layer of dull silver.
Farhan stood beside him, holding a portable terminal. The terminal displayed the real-time data they had captured through the QKD channel of that old-model satellite — STK-17254. That channel now wasn’t only transmitting SkyWalker’s autonomous domain advertisements; it was also transmitting something else: the control-link signal between the drone and the ground station.
The drone used Starlink’s communication protocol — this was one of the reasons Silas had chosen it, because Starlink’s protocol had the lowest latency, the highest bandwidth, and the strongest anti-interference capability. But it was also itsfatal weakness.
Because in Starlink’s low Earth orbit, there were 120,000 satellites operating. Each one was executing the protocol stack designed by Milan Vojnović. And Farhan and Lu Yuan had just spent weeks learning, through the nested entry point Milan had left, how to hijack data packets in the Starlink network through the SkyWalker protocol.
“Its control link uses an encrypted channel.” Farhan looked down at the data stream scrolling on the terminal. “The key exchange is completed through Starlink’s QKD module — theoretically unbreakable.”
“Theoretically.” Lu Yuan repeated the word.
He took the terminal from Farhan, watching the hexadecimal data packets scrolling rapidly across the screen. The drone’s control link used Starlink’s standard encryption protocol — the protocol Milan had designed. But Milan had left a set of routing rules in the nested entry point — when certain specific data packet characteristics appeared, the encryption layer could be bypassed for direct access to the raw data.
Lu Yuan entered that hexadecimal activation code — the key Milan had buried in the firmware: 0xA7F3_1C44_9B20_7D81.
The second layer of the nested entry point was triggered.
A new line of information appeared on the screen: 「Encryption bypass activated · Control link raw data readable」
The drone’s control command stream appeared on the terminal, no longer encrypted garbled text — a clear, readable sequence of instructions. Altitude, heading, speed, payload status. Lu Yuan’s finger scrolled through the parameters on the screen,found the one he was looking for: the target coordinate write interface.
“Can you modify its target coordinates?” Farhan asked.
“No need to modify its coordinates.” Lu Yuan’s gaze fell on another set of parameters — the drone’s altitude lock value and engine status control registers. “Its flight control system uses Starlink’s communication protocol stack. In the exception handling branch of the protocol stack — if the received data packet contains an invalid checksum — the flight control enters safe mode, pauses execution of current flight instructions, and waits for the ground station to send a new instruction set.”
“But that drone is already in autonomous mode — ”
“Autonomous mode relies on onboard inertial navigation and visual positioning systems. But if the flight control enters safe mode, it resets all navigation parameters — including its current coordinates. Its computer will ask itself one question: where am I?”
Farhan watched Lu Yuan’s fingers rapidly type a sequence of instructions on the terminal. He understood Lu Yuan’s plan now — not modifying the target coordinates, but causing a flight control reset. Making the drone lose its position information in safe mode.
“It will reacquire coordinates from the visual positioning system,” Farhan said. “As long as it sees the ground — ”
“Then we make it unable to see the ground.”
Lu Yuan typed the last instruction. Not sent to the drone — sent to STK-17254. That old-model satellite was passing over the target airspace at this moment. Its optical sensor — originally used for inter-satellite link alignment — could be redirected. Through the SkyWalker protocol, Lu Yuan sent a set of parameters to the satellite’s sensor control interface: aim at the drone’s airspace, activate interference light emitters across all bands.
Old-model satellites didn’t have interference light emitters. But they had inter-satellite laser link alignment lasers — a laser emitter designed for establishing optical communication connections with other satellites in space. It wasn’t designed for illumination. But if its beam was pointed toward the ground, after passing through the atmosphere, it wouldspread into a cone of light several hundred meters in diameter. The brightness of that cone wouldn’t be enough to burn anything — but it would be enough to make a drone’s visual positioning system lose all reference feature points in an instant.
Lu Yuan pressed Send.
Three seconds later — at an altitude of 400 kilometers — Starlink satellite STK-17254 rotated its laser aligner as instructed, pointing its optical axis toward the ground. The laser activated.
A beam of near-infrared light invisible to the naked eye fell vertically from space, through the atmosphere, spreading at the bottom of the cloud layer above the abandoned ground station — and then illuminating the entire ground directly beneath the drone. Not with visible light — with a beam of precisely modulated optical noise covering the sensitiveband of the visual positioning system.
The drone’s onboard computer lost all trackable ground feature points in an instant. Its inertial navigation system reported current position as normal, but the visual positioning system returned an unidentifiable uniform brightness field — no edges, no texture, no reference markers that could be used to correct accumulated inertial navigationdrift.
The flight control system entered safe mode.
The drone began to descend slowly — not in a dive, but in a controlled, standard safe-mode operation: reduce altitude, reduce airspeed, enter a holding pattern, until the visual positioning system recovered or the ground station sent new instructions.
But the ground station wouldn’t be sending new instructions. Because Milan had severed Silas’s connection to the command system. That drone was using its final logic — the logic written into the flight control firmware by Milan Vojnović — to descend in safe mode in a holding pattern.
It didn’t explode. It didn’t burn anything.
It circled three times over that laser-lit clearing, altitude dropping from twelve hundred meters to three hundred meters, and then its onboard computer executed the last preset instruction in safe mode: when battery power is sufficient and navigation cannot be restored, find the nearest flat area and perform an automatic landing.
The drone’s landing gear deployed. It touched down on a weed-covered clearing about a hundred meters from the ground station,slid a few meters, then stopped.
The noise of the propellers gradually decreased, then stopped.
The night wind once again became the only sound in this clearing.
Lu Yuan stood at the door of the equipment room, looking at the drone parked in the wild grass. Its electro-optical sensor still pointed at the ground, like a sentry whose eyes had been removed. On the terminal in his hand, the flight control status had switched to “Landed · Awaiting command.”
Farhan took the terminal from Lu Yuan, checking the flight control log. His finger slid line by line across the screen, his expression showing no obvious emotion in the faint backlight.
“Milan left backdoors in the flight control firmware too,” he said finally, quietly, with a calm that could have been surprise or numbness. “Not just Starlink’s communication protocol stack — he wrote backdoors into the firmware of all devices using the Starlink protocol stack. Drones, ground stations,terminal devices — everything.”
Lu Yuan didn’t speak. He turned and looked at the concrete wall of the equipment room — behind that wall, a server was running quietly, executing Data Haven’s route advertisements. That machine didn’t know it had nearly been destroyed in two different ways — by a beam from space and a drone carrying a microwave payload. It was just a server, executing code, not caring about the politics behind the code.
He looked up at the sky. The cloud layer was dispersing, the moonagain revealing itssilhouette. That old-model satellite STK-17254 had passed the zenith and was moving slowly southeast — its laser had been turned off, its optical axis had returned to the alignment direction of the inter-satellite link.
It looked no different from any ordinary Starlink satellite.
But what it had just done — for the first time in human history, using a satellite’s laser to illuminate a drone’s landing site — would not be recorded in any official log. Because that instruction was sent through Data Haven’s autonomous domain via the nested entry point, and any operation within the autonomous domain was not within Starlink’s audit system.
Milan had left a path in the nested entry point. Lu Yuan and Farhan had found how to walk that path. The drone had stopped before Data Haven, like someone suddenly asked an unanswerable question, standing still, laying down their weapon.
Because Data Haven wasn’t just indestructible — it had already learned from Starlink’s own system how to protect itself. It used the tools Milan left behind. Milan hadburied trapdoors in every brick of the wall. He built a perfect prison, then scattered the keys to the prison in the wind.
Lu Yuan turned and walked back into the equipment room. He needed to check the root server’s status. After a few steps, his phone vibrated in his pocket.
He didn’t stop walking. He continued into the equipment room, crouched beside the backup power cabinet, checking the indicators on the server’s front panel — all normal, green, running steadily.
Then he took the phone from his pocket.
It was a message. Short — only three words. The sender wasn’t any name in his contacts — the number wasn’t saved. But Lu Yuan recognized thelast digits of that string of digits: the Belgrade area code.
「You saw it.」
Not a question. Confirmation.
Lu Yuan held the phone, crouching beside the backup power cabinet in the equipment room for a long time. The low hum of the server fans formed a white noise wall around him. He remembered his daughter — remembered the new picture she had drawn this afternoon after the remote consultation, lying on her stomach on the bed: a drone parked on grass, with stars on its wings.
He didn’t know how she knew about the drone. Maybe she didn’t — maybe she was just drawing what she saw in her dreams.
He typed a reply to that Belgrade number. Only two words.
「I saw.」
After sending the message, he put the phone back in his pocket and stood up.
Farhan stood at the door of the equipment room, the night wind blowing in from behind him, messing up the hair on his forehead. He leaned against the doorframe, the terminal tucked under his arm, looking at Lu Yuan. His expression was — the kind a person has after a battle they themselves aren’t entirely sure they’ve won, seeing not the joy of victory, but something deeper, quieter.
“It stopped,” Farhan said.
“It stopped.”
“Milan burned his own bridges. That evidence sent to the CEO, the board, and the International Criminal Court — he not only took down Silas. He turned himself into an unpredictable person inside Starlink. The CEO will protect him — because he’s the only one who knows where all the nested entry points are — but he won’t be fully trusted anymore.”
Lu Yuan stood up, dusting off his knees.
“He knows.”
Farhan looked at him.
“He knew when he chose to walk through the door,” Lu Yuan said. “He knew that once he walked in, he couldn’t pretend he was just an observer anymore. He’s an accomplice now.”
The night wind passed over the wild grass in the clearing of the abandoned ground station, producing a continuous low sound. That drone sat silently in the grass a hundred meters away, like a sentry that had been disarmed. At 400 kilometers in orbit, an old-model satellite continued its silent orbital flight, its memory retaining a new record that had never been recorded by any audit system: a set of non-standard laser operation logs, and a data fragment about how a drone landed on a patch of illuminated grass.
Neither piece of data would appear in any official record.
But they existed.
Data Haven had survived another night.
